The LSRC has definitely gotten better for me as I am now developing a stronger understanding of not just Rails but Ruby. I am still not a hardcore developer but I am thinking that will change this year. This year the focus was on how to make things move faster, here is what I learned:

• Ruby 1.9 feature set will include multilingualization!
• Code coverage, though important may not reflect the true status of how stable your code
• Complexity metric should be part of your suite of tests
• FLOG your code! A cool way to discover where complexity lies within your MVC
• Metric will help establish priorities with work but the use of metrics should be within the dev team and not from a manager hoping for full coverage!
• Social thing to help, explain your code! useful for others to get up to speed on your work and keeps you focus on why you code the way you did
• Use Heckle! It mutates your code and tries to make test fail, gotta try that!
• Ruby community is embracing cloud computing
• PoolParty is one tool to work in a cloud
• Keynote of Matz was great, you can see that though he is very pleased with the adaption of Ruby, there was a subtle worry in him about Rails. Rails has always been push as a quick web framework to create web apps without learning Ruby and the focus is RAILS over Ruby. It was obvious Matz would like the focus shift back to the elegance of Ruby to strengthen the quality of the developer rather than speed. He seems genuinely sincere and humble. A calmness about him is a stark contrast to the rebel attitude of the community.
• github adds the nice social branching to your code base that allows simple branching and joining of code. SVN can do this but not as elegant nor practical.
• PacketFu is crazy cool for security folks. Killer features, will most likely be part of Metasploit

Very cool conference. Now I am all energize to expand my Ruby knowledge! Need to go to more of these to stay motivated!!!

So it has been MONTHS since I posted an image to my photoblog, yet I have been keeping that site current with the latest versions of plugins and Wordpress releases.  Well today I finally had an image I found interesting enough to post and ran into problems. It seems the new post revision feature of Wordpress 2.6 does not play well with images uploaded using yapb plugin. The work-around is to disable post revisions. Add the following lines to your wp-config.php file for your photoblog:

If you created blog posts in Wordpress 2.6 prior to this work-around the images may still not show up. I suggest deleting those posts and recreating them. Thanks yapb forum for the assistance. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next release.

UPDATE: yapb 1.9.5 has been released and addresses the issue of post revisions. Once you auto update your plugin, I love that feature, you can remove the lines added above. Now that’s service!

So a head hunter sent me an email about a php job here in Austin. Here is an excerpt:

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Who knew I would ever become so comfortable with the BASH shell. So much so that working in window’s cmd.exe slows you down dramatically. Where is my ls, ps, cp, rm, etc. I am a two letter lover! Well, it seems folks over at MS has been working on a similar shell and ported a lot of it over to Windows in their Powershell initiative. Obviously it is geared toward developers but it works well for day to day duties. It is nice to have all my two letter commands back. I wonder if they have a grep-like feature. My next step is to see if any of my scripts will work under windows vista like I have for my ubuntu lappy. Good times are here again…

I was reading the other day in my local newspaper about how a couple of developers are testing out the model of doing code storms and see if they can turn an idea into a product with a short turn around time. Simple idea that never seemed to be exploited until now. With such cheap web hosting plans and domains, it really does not take a whole lot to put a web project into production. Take a look at what Arron has put up as a basic idea with real promise: Fearless Blogging.

I hope to be there like Arron, or Curtis but first I need to learn more code…